Just perfect...

Great Film overall

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

I've seen it twice. It's a wonderfully crafted mishmash of thousands of cinematic tropes, ideas, and feelings packaged into 88 minutes of film. Yes, it is a movie with a plot, but like 2001, it's about the journey of interpretation and emotion that drives the film rather than resolving anything. It's goofy, horrifying, tense, lighthearted, crazy, but always perfect. I know the metaphor of a "roller-coaster ride" means almost nothing now-a-days, but it's the most apt comparison. It's like being shot into a haunted house on the moon in a different dimension. You will NOT see a single thing coming. I promise you. It's like watching a hour and a half trailer for a horror movie while you're on acid. None of this is hyperbole, but merely an attempt to accurately portray the film with a few words. Stop reading this review, get the highest quality copy of this film out there and watch it because there's nothing else to say.Except maybe Kung Fu is best girl, but that's just like, my opinion man.

The one thing I will grant the picture is that it's a unique and strange visual experience. It starts out interestingly enough in a creatively stylized manner, but then gets too clever by half, much too gimmicky, and ultimately incoherent as the story progresses. Well, maybe not incoherent entirely, because you can follow the story well enough, as a group of Japanese teenage girls falls victim to a demonic house in the countryside of Satoyama Village.In checking the credits page, it appears that the version I caught on Turner Classics changed the name of all the principal characters, so that the main character named 'Angel' on the IMDb title page became 'Gorgeous' in the film I saw. In no particular order, the remaining six girls went by the names of Fantasy, Sweet, Mac, Kung-Fu, Prof and Melody. Their English names in general referenced a character trait, so that 'Melody' was accomplished as a musician, and 'Kung-Fu' was a martial artist. Even the cat's name was changed, another reviewer called it 'Snowflake', while in the story I watched it had the very non-Japanese name of 'Blanche' - how they came up with that one I'll never know.Although it seems that the director's take on this movie was to produce something resembling horror, there's just too much goofy stuff occurring that takes the horror element right out of it. I'll refer to just two of the deaths in the story - one by a piano eating Melody (how appropriate!), the other involving Kung-Fu getting chomped by a ceiling light. After a while, one's interest in the story wanes because it's all just a bit too bizarre.As for the main protagonist, Angel/Gorgeous winds up being 'consumed' by the Auntie the girls originally intended to visit. Gorgeous was upset that her widowed father was going to remarry after eight years, so a change in vacation plans brought Gorgeous and her friends to Auntie's home in the country. In an effort to make friends with Gorgeous, the fiancé Ryoko Ema set out for Auntie's home, and upon arriving, the picture somehow totally disconnects from the comic/horror element, dissolving to a message about how the 'spirit of love can live forever'. Maybe it all had to do with the translation, but whatever it was, any message the director was attempting to convey was simply lost on this viewer. And I don't get lost too easily.

I'll keep this brief, in keeping with its quality. It's a noisy haunted-house comedy about giggling school girls seeing visions and the like. It's splashy and full of lurid colors and directorial razzle dazzle. It's haunting too, or at least the irrepressible musical theme is -- a kind of children's melody that appears throughout the movie in a dozen guises: as overscore, as a waltz, as a tinkle on a music box.I have nothing against melodies for kids. I mean, "Sesame Street" came up with some catchy tunes and look what Mozart did with "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Brahms wrote lullabies. But this just never stops. It's going round and round in my head right now, a musical carousel. Even the voices are telling it to stop, but does it listen? Don't make me laugh; I'll lose the beat.Anyway there is some convoluted story about one of the half dozen girls' widowed father being remarried -- to a knockout beauty too, Haruko Wanibuchi. Her name is ethnic but I think if you shook her family tree an American sailor might fall out of it.It's not a total loss. The haunted house is colorful, intricate, and fascinating in its layout. The images are less gaudy as the camera explores its passages and its weird dove-colored garden. And there are courageous references to World War II -- "A long time ago, Japan was in a great war." And there is an unexplained and shocking shot of an exploding atomic bomb. The teen-aged girls are attractive, but only in the way that all teen-aged girls are attractive in their unself-conscious purity. They don't look like the porcelain dolls some people find in Japanese skin flicks. Oh -- and they're polite too, in an old-fashioned way, covering their mouths with their hands when they laugh or giggle.But these virtues are swamped by the slapdash character of the film itself. I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it, unless, of course, there is some deep message in it that I missed in its entirety.

When a group of school-girls take a trip out to a supposed-cursed mansion to take care of its inhabitants, they find the place indeed haunted by a murderous spirit of one of their family members and try to break the curse before they all fall victim to the shenanigans.This was an absolutely crazy Japanese Haunted House comedy that manages to be wildly original and wholly entertaining. What really makes this one so much fun is once it actually gets to the house in question and things start happening, as the film becomes all that much better due to a very chaotic, kinetic energy that allows for it to remain both wildly funny as well as deliver some crazy horror imagery. It holds up as well as the gags, bouncing around from one extreme sight-gag to another without much deference for a plot, makes you laugh yet still manages to maintain a horror undertone within so many scenes of the mice flying out of the cupboards, the wooden planks coming to life or the visually-haunting scene of the two playing the piano to be rather horrific in nature yet still have quite a few laughs packed into them. As well, the balance between the comedic and the horror here is strong enough that scenes like the attack by the floating head out by the water-well, the absolutely crazy piano antics where it comes to life and first bites off her fingers then actively swallows her whole inside it in a rather bizarre, crazy sequence and the rather crazy sequence of the mattress flying off the shelves and burying the victim underneath, only to then completely disappear in a rather sizable pile of feathers and insulation as a life-like doll later on. This crazy fun is only topped by the sheer madness of the finale, as nothing about it makes any sense other than to completely become filled with the most bizarre, outrageous visual gags possible with demonic cat transformations, supernatural kung-fu battles with possessed furniture, an endless torrent of blood-filled water and the strikingly haunting ghost girl running around which is only a small part of the craziness here within this section of the film, and earns this one so much positive that there's more than enough here to hold this out over the minor flaws here. The problems here are all centered on the film's bookends, as neither part comes off too well. In the beginning half, the problem here is the lame comedy and dragging pace here for these give this a slow beginning which makes this one a challenge to get into being way too hit-or-miss to be the main focus of the film. The finale is even worse, which is way too much a fantasy-driven ploy here that's based around the big romance angle that's just quite confusing here touching on these themes that were never a part of the film until this section. Overall, this might be off-the-wall but it's definitely memorable and enjoyable.Rated Unrated/R: Violence, Language and Nudity.